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Reviews

Fallible church
A film about confessors and traitors

The Church has to restore the faith which people once had in it, claims Asztrik Várszegi, arch-abbot of Pannonhalma. The film was made to commemorate the persecuted priests – and to re-examine the issue of agents.

Everything that moves is suspicious – so declares one of the contributors to the documentary Confessors & Traitors, which deals with the relationship of church and state in the Rákosi era. The film by Katalin Petényi and Barna Kabay, with the contribution of arch-abbot Asztrik Várszegi of Pannonhalma, evokes destinies to show the route that led from the disablement and systematic laceration of the Church to the close collaboration of the communist state and the clergy.

In the years of austere dictatorship the communist regime considered “clerical reaction” its arch enemy. Ecclesiastical schools were secularized and the great majority of orders were dissolved. More than ten thousand nuns and monks became outlaws from one day to the next. Several hundred priests were dragged through the mire by show trials, defamations and false allegations. They suffered a series of humiliations and tortures in prisons. After the revolution of 1956 was suppressed, another wave of persecution was launched, even though the Church, according to Asztrik Várszegi, had not played a decisive role in the preparation of the revolution or in the fighting.

During the 1950s priests were usually roped in to become agents by means of intimidation and blackmail. Later – due to the mutual indulgence of the Hungarian state and the Vatican – the situation changed. The number of those who filed reports to the state in hope of a career or other benefits continued to increase. The Kádár era yielded a set of clergymen dedicated to the “people's democracy”. Resistance was pushed to the margins, while “trustworthy” priests climbed higher and higher on the career ladder.

The film screened in the Uránia cinema – an abridged version of the complete material – deals with ecclesiastical dignitaries who were involved with the agent issue and are still alive. It does so with perceptible caution and in a small compass, since its creators are trying to draw a precise picture. One of the several bishops emeritus introduced collaborated with the secret police under duress and tried to compose as harmless reports as possible, while another executed his work as an informer to the pronounced satisfaction of his contact officer. We can only evangelize, if we manage to restore and consolidate faith in the Church, emphasises the arch-abbot of Pannonhalma at the end of the film.

The church is just as fallible and versatile in its fallibility as we all are – said Gyögy Gyarmati, Director General of the Hungarian State Security Historical Archives, summarising his impressions in a discussion held after the screening. The proportion of those the Church dragged through the mire is high – just like that of the informers. According to Gyarmati, the image of “martyr church” and “confessor clergymen” predominated in the decade following the 1989-90 political changes. However, this has veered around and gone to the opposite extreme in the present decade. The Church has not accounted for its deeds, has not drawn the conclusions from the past, plus it has been left out of monitoring.

Gábor Czene
Népszabadság, 18 March 2009 (page 3)

New film about church agents

An emphatic documentary, aspiring to be balanced, has been made about the persecution of the Church during the communist regime by Katalin Petényi (writer-director), Barna Kabay (director-producer) and cameraman Péter Jankura. Asztrik Várszegi, Benedictine arch-abbot and chairman of the Ödön Lénárt Foundation responsible for exploring the Roman Catholic past is the narrator. “The 'flow' of the gospel cannot be restored without removing the obstacles from its way, without the retrieval of society's faith,” he says.

In the film, Confessors & Traitors, individual destinies are re-created with the help of documents, testimonies about the era and filmed re-enactments. In this manner the great events of ecclesiastical politics are brought to life – the secularization of schools, the creation of the peace priests’ movement, the dissolution of orders, the setting up of the State Office for Church Affairs, the waves of arrests and the partial intergovernmental agreement of 1964 with the Vatican.

István Joó
Magyar Nemzet, 18 March 2009 (page 3)

Confessors & Traitors

A film of peculiar genre was screened in the Uránia Cinema on 17 March 2009. The film was in two parts of 50 minutes each. The invited audience at the premiere stared at the screen breathless. At the end there was some sparse applause in ‘appreciation’ of the material viewed. However, this quickly ceased, since there is nothing to applaud in this film, just as there is nothing to applaud in the way the last half a century passed and the way we lived it. The directors basically have embarked on a task almost beyond their potential in trying to introduce viewers to the grave facts and atmosphere of the 1950s with a comprehensive vision. Nevertheless, the directors – Katalin Petényi and Barna Kabay – have ingeniously tackled the representation of events running simultaneously, yet still cohesively.

The film presents the everyday struggles of “confessors”, simple faithful Christians in reality, to live what God and the gospel rightly expects from them. The persecutors made them confessors. However, everyone became an agent on his or her own accord, via his or her own personal tragedy. This second level reveals to the viewer the operation of the persecuting apparatus, the retaliatory measures and the instruments of existential defencelessness. A third level serves the authenticity of the pictured events via the constant introduction of relevant archive documents.

The film is a documentary in the sense that the depicted events are real and genuinely happened in the way presented. Anyone could follow them up, as the directors did, in the Hungarian State Security Historical Archives and inspect the locations that are frightfully real, not elements of a scenery. At the same time it is also a created film in that a fair number of the participants of events occurring 30-50 years ago can no longer be filmed.

The directors have featured characteristic and sometimes arbitrary faces and events from the material dealing with 50 years of Christian persecution. Why these and why in this ratio? One might argue with that, but it would be in vain. In the future a series of films might be made about almost every character and several events in the film, or about the innumerable moments it has not investigated, yet even those would not be able to diminish the physical and ethical sufferings of those tragic 50 years.

The outstanding merit of the film is that while staying authentic and very moderate, it tries to provide a comprehensive picture of what happened to us, Christians, during the half a century of persecution and what kind of reaction we, Christians, were able to give to this persecution. The depicted details always refer to the whole and are interpreted within it.

The film does not accuse, does not justify, does not judge. It represents.

Could it be hoped that this premiere will launch a self-examination among Christians? One of the integral points the film highlights is the inescapable task of confronting the past – but will it really happen?

Ágnes Tímár
28 March 2009